Tuesday 24 September 2013 07.10 EDT
First published on Tuesday 24 September 2013 07.10 EDT

Take a break from the diplomatic row engulfing European club rugby and study the top of the Aviva Premiership table. You will find Saracens sitting pretty. Played three, won three, all with try bonus points. Even more strikingly they are a team playing with far greater freedom, having sat down in the summer and concluded their attacking system was not maximising the talents of their available personnel. Maybe their paymasters also reminded them that dull rugby was not going to woo many new fans to their new HQ in Hendon.

If so, they are dead right. There is no point embarking on the current war with the unions over the Heineken Cup if they cannot serve up a product which reaches more satisfying parts than the existing ERC-run tournament. That does not mean candyfloss rugby, necessarily, but it does require a broader outlook. "We have ambitions to be something more than a quirky little club in north London," confirms Edward Griffiths, Sarries' go-ahead chief executive.

The first step, clearly, is to win trophies on the field and play a brand of rugby which encourages more people to spend their Sunday afternoons just off the M1 in a part of north London where few tourists stray. But then what? Saracens want to have a profile around the world, to be the best-known club not just in their own country but globally. It is years ago now that Nigel Wray, the chairman, signed up Francois Pienaar and talked about becoming the "Manchester United of rugby" but that grand ambition still smoulders.

Which is why Sarries have been cosying up to new friends far beyond their training base in St Albans. In the next few days and weeks they are due to announce partnership agreements with clubs in Africa and the Far East, with North and South America also on their "global network" radar. Already they have announced tie-ups with clubs in Moscow, Abu Dhabi and Tonga, with Nairobi about to be added to the list.

Some will wonder about the point of it all when only 8,000 fans currently turn up to Sarries' home Premiership games. They would be advised to extricate their heads from the sand and listen to Griffiths. "What we're trying to do is recognise that rugby is entering a bit of a boom phase, in terms of inclusion in the Olympics and the forthcoming Rugby World Cups in England and Japan. The game has the potential to grow very significantly over the next six to seven years and we want the Saracens brand to be at the forefront of that growth."

Lots of emerging rugby nations, in other words, suddenly have pots of Olympic funding and little idea, as yet, how best to utilise it. Saracens are offering a helping hand which, in return, gives them a global footprint which appeals to sponsors and talent scouts alike. "It makes sense commercially and in terms of recruitment," admits Griffiths, who is spending this week tying up various loose contractual ends in the Far East and elsewhere. "What we're giving them is what they need: the intellectual capital. It could be coaching programmes, strength and conditioning programmes or medical information." Earlier this month Sarries also announced a broadcast partnership deal with the business news network CNBC, which it is hoped will give the club (and its sponsor Allianz) lucrative exposure to an "affluent business audience around the world".

If some of this sounds more relevant to Financial Times readers than rugby fans, it is impossible to fault the sporting logic of Griffiths's trip to Tonga this summer where he visited the village from which the Vunipola clan originally emerged and signed a deal with the local side Toa Saracens, who will henceforth play in red and black. Think of David Attenborough visiting the rugby equivalent of the Galápagos Islands, with vast undiscovered prop forwards roaming the landscape, and you will get the general idea.

From the age of 14 promising young Tongan players will be granted educational bursaries and benefit from expert rugby, dietary and conditioning advice. If it works, Sarries will be first in the queue of beneficiaries, which explains why their academy manager Don Barrell is about to embark on the world's longest scouting trip, buoyed by the knowledge that 140 Tongans are playing some form of professional rugby despite a total national population of just 104,000. "We're sending a strength and conditioning guy to Tonga for three weeks to run courses every night," reports Griffiths. This is as fertile a rugby breeding ground as anywhere on the planet.

The French are also active in the South Pacific, once the leisurely preserve of New Zealand's recruitment officers. Clermont Auvergne have an academy partnership with the Nadroga club in Fiji; within three years of arriving from Nadroga, Noa Nakaitaci was a member of France's tour squad in New Zealand this summer. Toulon's teenage winger Josua Tuisova is another fast-rising Fijian comet. Saracens can feel the goalposts shifting and are reacting accordingly. Griffiths has not jumped aboard his latest bunch of long-haul flights this week simply for the good of his health.

CAMERA, ACTION!

A letter – how refreshing – arrives on my doormat from a Mr Robert Maddock of Leicester, a qualified optometrist no less. In his view rugby union on television will irritate more viewers than it attracts until there is a reduction in the number of close-up shots and overly cute camera angles during play. He reckons some modern directors would have missed Phil Bennett's classic sidestepping for the Barbarians in 1973 in their haste to zoom in on the fly-half's facial expression rather than the bigger picture.

"Please, Robert, if you have any influence, get the broadcasters to give us a wider view of things so we can shout at the telly: 'Watch out – he's behind you!'" Nil influence, sadly, but how many others share Mr Maddock's personal bête noir?